- Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
- 2-3 annotations.
Judy:
A majority of the children in foster care across the country are children of color from poor communities. Society stigmatizes poor families of color as ‘unfit’ to raise their children often because they cannot afford to do so, such as stigma ignores the fact that there are institutional impediments in place that contribute to them being poor. Middle-class families with adequate resources to provide for their children, on the other hand, are often seen as appropriate caretakers. Rickie Solinger states that “public officials and policy advisers implied that poor biological mothers were unfit for Mother’s Day commemorations and that public funding should reflect that position” (2002, 04). The media’s presentation of poor women as being ‘unfit’ for motherhood supports the idea that only white women with socioeconomic status are suitable as mothers because they can afford to take care of their children. The state’s focus on poor families of color leads to a societal idea that these families cannot raise children, which can affect whether or not the state removes children from those families. By recognizing that class and race are social factors that determine parents’ ability to raise a family, surveillance thus comes out of a process in which poverty, race, and state support intersect. I thought this analysis would be a good framing when I bring in the movie Bad Moms at the beginning of my podcast setting up how the media continues the stigma that mother’s of color are not fit to be mothers.
I know in the previous logs I wanted my podcast to have a conclusion of the consequences of not having access to resources for their children which leds to tensions when CPS is involved, but I also want to include when the state does help working-class families/mothers to achieve “good” parenting, rather than the state providing assistance to poor mothers of color, state funded programs are used to regulate and surveil at risk communities and populations. According to Bridges, “the admission dissembles and dissimulates precisely to the extent it renders the poor woman’s body itself to be inherently suspect, problematic, and unruly” (2011, 99), suggesting that poor mothers of color cannot regulate themselves making them a danger to their children. These poor mothers are considered to be undesirable by society because they do not fit into the social norms society has, which encourages the state to regulate and supervise them as much as possible increasing children removals. This goes back to my original proposal how families in particular working-class mothers of color do not fit the societal ideal of “good” parenting which makes them a target to CPS.
Bridges, Khiara. 2011. Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Solinger, Rickie. 2002. Beggars and Choosers. Hill and Wang.
Lopez’s Comments:
You make a great point in your second paragraph. It is true that the state does not help working-class and working-poor families/mothers achieve the goal of being ‘good mothers’, as they envision. This is a really interesting dimension to your project. It can be left as an analytical point, or do you have data that helps support this claim.